The Life of Jefferson Davis. Alfriend Frank Heath
least once, that I had no disposition to question his Democracy; that I did not wish to withhold from him any tribute which was due to his talent and his worth? Did I not offer to resign the only chairmanship of a committee I had if the Senate would confer it upon him? Then, where is this spirit of proscription, the complaint of which has constituted some hours of his speech? If others have manifested it, I do not know it; and as the single expression of “no quarter to the doctrine of squatter sovereignty” was the basis of his whole allegation, I took it for granted his reference to a purpose to do him and his friends such wrong must have been intended for me.
The fact that the Senator criticised the idea of the States prescribing the terms on which they will act in a party convention recognized to be representative, is suggestive of an extreme misconception of relative position; and the presumption with which the Senator censured what he was pleased to term “the seceders,” suggested to me a representation of the air of the great monarch of France when, feeling royalty and power all concentrated in his own person, he used the familiar yet remarkable expression, “the State, that’s me.” Does the Senator consider it a modest thing in him to announce to the Democratic Convention on what terms he will accept the nomination; but presumptuous in a State to declare the principle on which she will give him her vote? It is an advance on Louis Quatorze.
Nothing but the most egregious vanity, something far surpassing even the bursting condition of swollen pride, could have induced the Senator to believe that I could not speak of squatter sovereignty without meaning him.
Towards the Senator, personally, I have never manifested hostility – indeed, could not, because I have ever felt kindly. Many years of association, very frequent coöperation, manly support from him in times of trial, are all remembered by me gratefully. The Senator, therefore, had no right to assume that I was making war upon him. I addressed myself to a doctrine of which he was not the founder, though he was one of the early disciples; but he proved an unprofitable follower, for he became rebellious, and ruined the logic of the doctrine. It was logical in Mr. Cass’s mind; he claimed the power to be inherent in the people who settled a new Territory, and by this inherent power he held that they might proceed to form government and to exercise its functions. There was logic in that – logic up to the point of sovereignty. Not so with the Senator. He says the inhabitants of the Territories derive their power to form a government from the consent of Congress; that when we decide that there are enough of them to constitute a government, and enact an organic law, then they have power to legislate according to their will. This power being derived from an act of Congress – a limited agency tied down to the narrow sphere of the constitutional grant – is made, by that supposition, the bestower of sovereignty on its creature.
I had occasion the other day to refer to the higher law as it made its first appearance on earth – the occasion when the tempter entered the garden of Eden. There is another phase of it. Whoever attempts to interpose between the supreme law of the Creator and the creature, whether it be in the regions of morals or politics, proclaims a theory that wars upon every principle of government. When Congress, the agent for the States, within the limits of its authority, forms, as it were, a territorial constitution by its organic act, he who steps in and proclaims to the settlers in that Territory that they have the right to overturn the Government, to usurp to themselves powers not delegated, is preaching the higher law in the domain of politics, which is only less mischievous than its other form, because the other involves both politics and morals in one ruinous confusion.
The Senator spoke of the denial of Democratic fellowship to him. After what has been said and acknowledged by the Senator, it is not to be supposed that it could have any application to me. It may be proper to add, I know of no such denial on the part of other Democratic Senators. Far be it from me to vaunt the fact of being in a majority, and to hold him to the hard rule he prescribes to us, of surrendering an opinion where we may happen to have been in a minority. Were I to return now to him the measure with which he metes to us, when he assumes that a majority in the Charleston Convention has a right to prescribe what shall be our tenets, I might, in reply to him, say, as a sincere adherent of the Democratic party, how can you oppose the resolutions pending before the Senate? If twenty-seven majority in a body of three hundred and three constituent members had, as he assumes, the power to lay down a binding law, what is to be said of him who, with a single adherent, stands up against the whole of his Democratic associates? He must be outside of the party, according to his enunciation; he must be wandering in the dark regions to which he consigns the followers of Mr. Yancey.
The Senator said he had no taste for references to things which were personal, and then proceeded to discuss that of which he showed himself profoundly ignorant – the condition of things in Mississippi. It is disagreeable for me to bring before the Senate matters which belong to my constituents and myself, and I should not do so but for the fact of their introduction into the Senator’s elaborate speech, which is no doubt to be spread over all parts of the country. The Senator, by some means or other, has the name of very many citizens of Mississippi, and as there is nothing in our condition to attract his special attention, his speech is probably to be sent over a wide field of correspondence; and it is, therefore, the more incumbent on me to notice his attempt to give a history of affairs that were transacted in Mississippi. He first announces that Mississippi rebuked the idea of intervention asserted in 1850; then that Mississippi rejected my appeal; that Mississippi voted on the issue made up by the compromise measure of 1850, and vaunts it as an approval of that legislation of which he was the advocate and I the opponent. Now, Mississippi did none of these things. Mississippi instructed her Senators, and I obeyed her instructions. I introduced into this body the resolutions which directed my course. On that occasion I vindicated Mississippi, and especially the Southern rights men, from the falsehood of that day, and reiterated now, of a purpose to dissolve the Union. I vindicated her by extracts from the proceedings as well of her convention as of her primary assemblies; and my remarks on that occasion, as fully as the events to which he referred in terms of undeserved compliment, justified the Senator in saying to-day that he knew I had always been faithful to the Government of which I was a part.
Acting under the instructions from Mississippi – not merely voting and yielding reluctant compliance; but, according to my ideas of the obligation of a Senator, laboring industriously and zealously to carry out the instructions which my State gave me, I took and maintained the position I held in relation to the measures of 1850. As it was with me a cordial service, I went home to vindicate the position which was hers, as well as my own. Shortly after that a canvass was opened, in which a distinguished gentlemen of our party, who had not been a member of Congress, was nominated for Governor. Questions other than the compromise measures of 1850 arose in that canvass; they were discussed in a great degree to the exclusion of a consideration of the merits of the action of Congress in 1850; and, at the election in September, for delegates to a convention, we had fallen from a party majority of some eight thousand to a minority of nearly the same number. It was after the decision of the question involved in calling a convention – after our party was defeated – after the candidate for Governor had retired, that the Democracy of Mississippi called upon me to bear their standard. It was esteemed a forlorn hope, therefore an obligation of honor not to decline the invitation. But so far as the action in the Senate in 1850 was concerned, if it had any effect, it must have been the reverse of that assumed, as, in the subsequent election for State officers on the first Monday in November, this majority of nearly eight thousand against us was reduced to about one thousand.
But when this convention assembled, though a large majority of the members belonged to the party which the Senator has been pleased to term the “Submissionists” – a name which they always rejected – this convention of the party most adverse to me, when they came to act on the subject said, after citing the “compromise” measures of the Congress of 1850:
“And connected with them, the rejection of the proposition to exclude slavery from the Territories of the United States, and to abolish it in the District of Columbia; and, while they do not entirely approve, will abide by it as a permanent adjustment of this sectional controversy, so long as the same, in all its features, shall be faithfully adhered to and enforced.”
Then they go on to recite six different causes, for which they will resort to the most extreme remedies which we had supposed ever could be necessary. The case only requires that I should say that